[3] Plutarch. “The Life of Pyrrhus”. Parallel Lives. IX (1920 ed.). Loeb Classical Library. p. 21.8. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
Competitive ethics (I’d be happy to find a better term) is the study of ethics as strategies or phenotypes competing for mindshare rather than as statements about right and wrong.
The word ‘mindshare’ there completely changes the piece, from what it seemed to be leading up to, up to this point.
Competitive ethics is to morality as FiveThirtyEight is to politics. FiveThirtyEight doesn’t tell us which candidate’s positions are correct, and we don’t expect them to. We expect them to tell us who will win.
And this is another, completely different thing, that doesn’t have anything to do with ethics.
There are many lines of thinking relevant to this question, but I can’t find any that address it directly.
Win and you get to pretend you were good. Everyone else will erase you, change you, or paint you as a terrible thing completely unrelated to what you were—an ugly scarecrow bearing your name but their visage.
neoevolution
neo or neuro?
The most straightforward way ethical systems compete is by the degree of natalism and heritability they entail: how many offspring do they lead to in their believers, and how effectively are they passed from parents to children?
It’s important to not neglect fitness here. Naively maximizing the number of offspring doesn’t just result in deaths, but also in malnourishment. Maximum population, all weak and starved, does not an army make.
deride fertility (e.g. certain environmentalist ethics) and encourage freedom of thought.
Encouraging freedom of thought conflicts with other values. You are free to think—except that thought. It’s not an absolute, it just doesn’t work with absolutes. Unless it’s a lie.
I hear more about people leaving fundamentalist religions than joining them. But ethics of free thought combined with low fertility may not be sustainable.
Unless free thought outlaws systems that don’t support/work against it?
Going further, it may be that selfish ethical systems (e.g. Ayn Rand, Gordon Gekko)
Selfish people don’t have time to read Ayn Rand, they’re busy doing what they want. What about hedonism?
Causality and correlation are hard to tease apart here, but doing so isn’t necessary. An ethical system can win both by granting success to its holders or by being adopted by successful individuals.
And that’s where you’ve lost me. ‘These systems of belief lead to success among their holders’ is interesting. ‘Successful people happen to believe this because they’re successful not the other way around’, not so much.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is purported to have said “You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.” This quotation is interesting in that (1) it’s a normative claim about normative claims, and (2) it assumes that ethics has a direction.
Or it assumes ethics has a magnitude.
But if you build an “ethical” AI that keeps getting deleted by its “unethical” AI peers, have you accomplished your mission of building ethical AI?
I’m not able to join the AI alignment discussion until AI alignment researchers start putting competitive ethical questions more front and center.
AI peers? It seems more likely that an ‘ethical AI’ will be less powerful/move slower, and not ‘keep getting deleted’ but get deleted once. And then it’s game over.
Consider a meta-ethics—call it ethical consistentism maybe—where the probability of a moral statement being correct is proportional to its survival.
That’s not a meta-ethic, that’s a strategy. And ‘ethical’ doesn’t belong in this statement.
The only relation to ‘ethical’ your stuff has is that it asks ‘will this survive?’ Arguably, ability to survive impacts ability to bring about the ‘ethical’ ends/whatever valued. It also might impact how much* the system itself survives—if the ‘more pragmatic ethics’ eventually drops the ‘ethics’, what left isn’t an ethic.
Competitive Ethics, or (the study of) the Competition of Ethics?
Does it matter if you win, if you sacrifice your highest values along the way?
What does it even mean to win?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.
— Plutarch[3]
[3] Plutarch. “The Life of Pyrrhus”. Parallel Lives. IX (1920 ed.). Loeb Classical Library. p. 21.8. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
The word ‘mindshare’ there completely changes the piece, from what it seemed to be leading up to, up to this point.
And this is another, completely different thing, that doesn’t have anything to do with ethics.
Win and you get to pretend you were good. Everyone else will erase you, change you, or paint you as a terrible thing completely unrelated to what you were—an ugly scarecrow bearing your name but their visage.
neo or neuro?
It’s important to not neglect fitness here. Naively maximizing the number of offspring doesn’t just result in deaths, but also in malnourishment. Maximum population, all weak and starved, does not an army make.
Encouraging freedom of thought conflicts with other values. You are free to think—except that thought. It’s not an absolute, it just doesn’t work with absolutes. Unless it’s a lie.
Unless free thought outlaws systems that don’t support/work against it?
Selfish people don’t have time to read Ayn Rand, they’re busy doing what they want. What about hedonism?
And that’s where you’ve lost me. ‘These systems of belief lead to success among their holders’ is interesting. ‘Successful people happen to believe this because they’re successful not the other way around’, not so much.
Or it assumes ethics has a magnitude.
AI peers? It seems more likely that an ‘ethical AI’ will be less powerful/move slower, and not ‘keep getting deleted’ but get deleted once. And then it’s game over.
That’s not a meta-ethic, that’s a strategy. And ‘ethical’ doesn’t belong in this statement.
The only relation to ‘ethical’ your stuff has is that it asks ‘will this survive?’ Arguably, ability to survive impacts ability to bring about the ‘ethical’ ends/whatever valued. It also might impact how much* the system itself survives—if the ‘more pragmatic ethics’ eventually drops the ‘ethics’, what left isn’t an ethic.
*/how long/how likely